Bannuchi Pashto: the speech of the Bannu valley

At a glance

• Bannuchi is the Pashto of the irrigated middle of the Bannu valley, the country of the Bannuchi. The Marwat to the south, the Niazi of Isakhel across the Kurram and the Wazir along the western edge each speak differently again. [1, 3]

• Georg Morgenstierne put Bannuchi among the dialects that carry the vowel change furthest. The literary words plār "father" and mor "mother" are plor and mer in Bannu. [4, 5]

• A Bannu speaker recorded for Ibrahim Khan's 2021 article in the Pashto Academy's journal says "father" as پلور, plor. A Marwat speaker in the same article keeps plār. [6]

• J. G. Lorimer, a British officer who wrote the Waziri grammar of 1902, recorded the saying that the Waziri dialect is hard and that of the Bannuchis soft. [2]

• Thorburn's Bannu (1876) prints a collection of Pashto proverbs gathered in the valley, which he called the first yet attempted, with the Pashto set in type. [1]

Who speaks it

Bannuchi is not the speech of the whole district. Thorburn, who began the land settlement of the district in 1872, named four Pashtun tribes there: the Bannuchis on the Kurram, the Niazis and then the Marwats on the plain to the south, and the Wazirs, whose settlement in the north of the valley he dated to the close of the previous century. [1] For the place and its history, see Bannu: the valley between the Kurram and the Tochi.

Grierson's Linguistic Survey of India (1921) separated two kinds of Bannu Pashto. Dr T. L. Pennell of the Bannu mission recorded one speaker as an educated Pashtun of the town, and another as an uneducated Bannuchi, "the true inhabitants of the district". Grierson called the first the elegant form of southern Pashto and noted that it used some Hindki phrases. The second he labelled the Bannuchi dialect. [3]

The Linguistic Data Consortium's four-way grouping, which follows Josef Elfenbein, puts Bannu in the south-eastern group centred on Quetta, together with the Waziri, the Sherani, the Kakar, the Achakzai and the Tarin. [8] The general picture is in Pashto dialects: soft and hard speech. The Karlanri vowel shift that Bannu shares with Waziristan and Khost is set out in South-eastern Pashto: Khost, Paktia and the Karlanri speech.

Vowels

The vowels are what a listener hears first. In 1926 Morgenstierne noted that Waziri and Bannuchi have changed the vowels of the literary language, and gave the Bannuchi forms mer, plor and las against literary mor, plār and las. [4] In the Report on a Linguistic Mission to North-Western India (1932) he described a tendency from Afridi to Waziri to change the vowel system, carried furthest "in those Waziri and Bannu dialects", where ordinary ā, o and u become o, e and i. [5]

Thorburn had said much the same in 1876, in a passage that mixes observation with a joke. The proverbs in his book are spelled in the standard way, he wrote, but a reader who wished to read one "as Bannúchís speak it" should pronounce every á as ó, every ó as é and every ú as í. [1] That is the same three-way shift, set down fifty years before Morgenstierne.

Grierson's note on the Bannuchi dialect (from Pennell's recording of 1899) gives the vowels in more detail. A long ā is pronounced like ō or ū, a long ō or ū as ē or ī, a short a often becomes u or o, and a short u becomes i or e. He lists the pronouns mū or mō "me" and tū or tō "thee". [3]

Ibrahim Khan, a barrister who publishes on Pashto dialects, heard the first of these changes in a recording of a 78-year-old Bannu man made by the linguist Yousaf Khan Jazab. The word plor "father" had a long rounded vowel, which Khan measured and matched to a back rounded ɔː. [6] His reading agrees with what Elfenbein wrote, that Bannuchi mainly goes with northern Waziri. [6] The vowel is the one Anne Boyle David, in her 2014 grammar, calls Waziri metaphony: plār becomes plor, mor becomes mer and lur becomes lir. She notes that the change may be missing from a word, may be optional, and may stop at an intermediate sound, as Lorimer's mixed spellings show. [7]

The Marwat do not follow. Khan's Marwat speaker, taken from Jazab's recordings, says plār, and Khan concludes that Marwat is a south-eastern dialect that the vowel shift has not touched. [6]

Consonants

On the letters that divide Pashto dialects, the sources for Bannu agree on one point and differ on others. Grierson wrote that, as in the other southern dialects, ښ is pronounced sh and not kh. [3] That puts Bannu with Quetta and Kandahar, not with Peshawar, and the LDC report says the same of its south-eastern group. [8]

The affricates are less settled. Grierson says that the letters ز z and ځ dz are often interchanged in Bannuchi, so that "son" is zoe or dzoe. He says ژ is pronounced something like jh but is still written zh. [3] Morgenstierne wrote that the dental affricates ts and dz turn into s and z in many north-eastern dialects "and also in Bannuchi", and that the same dialects often have j for zh. [5] The LDC report, by contrast, says ts and dz stay as they are in the south-eastern group. [8] The three statements describe different speakers or different decades. None of them is a full inventory of Bannuchi sounds.

Grierson's note on Marwat, from Pennell's specimens, adds that the Marwat say ښ as plain s, so that the verb "was" is sa where others have sha. [3] Thorburn's recipe tells a reader to "transpose sibilants and labials freely" for Bannuchi, which fits the loose sibilants Grierson and Morgenstierne describe, though Thorburn gives no examples. [1]

Lorimer, writing about Waziri, found b, m, n, k and w of Peshawar Pashto often becoming w, w, l, kw and y in Waziri: bēga "evening" is wēga, nwar "sun" is lmar. He added that the rules were uncertain. [2] David reports the same pairs as Middle-dialect consonant change, with nmar and lmar marked as eastern and western variants. [7] Those are Waziri words. Whether the Bannuchis share each one is not stated in these sources.

Grammar

No full grammar of Bannuchi has been published on its own. What exists is a short list of features in Grierson, scattered remarks in Khan and a place for Bannu among the sites that Hallberg visited, which David uses in her chapter on the Middle dialects. [3, 6, 7]

The best documented feature is the first person singular of the verb. Khan, following Jazab, notes a nasal ending, ə̃, in Bannuchi, Waziri and Khattak speech. Marwat, which lacks the vowel shift, shares the ending. Khan's Bannu example is zə ghwoṛə̃, "I want", where the Kandahar and Yusufzai form is zə ghwāṛəm. [6] Grierson's note on Marwat says the same thing in another way: the ending -am of the first person becomes a nasal. [3] David finds that in Waziri and Dzadrani the endings -əm and -əma vary freely. [7]

The sentences Pennell took down in 1899 give the grammar in use. He recorded the parable of the two sons, in Bannuchi, and Grierson printed it in Pashto script, with transliteration and a word-for-word English line. It opens:

Dī yaw sarī dwa dzamūn wī.

Of one man two sons were.

When the famine comes, the younger son says to himself:

Zu di lwūzhi marū.

I from hunger die.

and decides to go home:

Zu wi-chug-shū wau akhpul plōr-ta wi-wēi-shū.

I will-arise and my-own father-to will-go.

These are Grierson's transliterations with his English glosses. [3] The word for "father" is plōr, as Morgenstierne and Khan have it, and akhpul, "own", is one of the words Grierson singled out as characteristic. [3, 4, 6]

Words

Several short wordlists survive. Lorimer, in the introductory note to his Waziri grammar, remarked that in Bannu the word for a bullet is golai, and that a Bannu Waziri may fail to recognise it when it is said gēlai, as on the Tochi. He gave the Bannu district as an example of how much one valley varies: a Hathi Khel, a Sperkai and an Umarzai each have their own way of saying "I will not". [2] The remarks are about Waziri speakers in Bannu, not about the Bannuchi, but they show what a neighbour heard in the same valley.

Thorburn's footnotes explain a few local terms. A dum is a village minstrel and odd-job man who in most villages was kept by the community. A Buran is a torrent bed in Bannu fed by springs and the Kurram. [1] The proverbs below carry more Pashto wording from the valley than either of these notes.

Thorburn's proverbs

Thorburn began collecting proverbs in 1872, when he started the land settlement of Bannu, and arranged them in the hot weather of 1874. His preface says the work was an introduction to the sayings "of the Pashto-speaking inhabitants". He wrote that the collection was "the first yet attempted of Pashto proverbs", and that when he had exhausted the proverbs of the district he received others from Khost and Peshawar which turned out to be old friends in new dresses. [1]

He printed the English first and the Pashto in a separate chapter, in Raverty's and Bellew's spelling and not as the Bannuchis, Waziris and Marwats pronounce the words, since he thought no two akhunds, the local scribes, would spell a proverb alike. [1] The Pashto below is copied from those printed pages in his spelling, with the transliteration in a plain form and Thorburn's own English.

From the section on begging:

سپي که په خپل منځ کښي سره خوري فقير ته ئي يوه وي

Spi ka pa khpal mandz kshi sara khori, faqir ta ye yawa wi.

Though dogs fight amongst themselves, still they are at one against the beggar man.

Thorburn added that if Bannuchis forty years before his time were the dogs, and the Wazirs the beggars, the saying fitted them too. That is his gloss. [1]

که دې وي خوره که نه دې وي مره

Ka de wi khora, ka na de wi mra.

If you have, eat; if you have not, die.

He took it to mean that a man should bear hardship without begging. [1]

From the section he called "Class and local":

که ګذران دې په کار وي پیشوګان مه تله

Ka guzaran de pa kar wi, pishogan ma tala.

If you want to live in peace, don't weigh the cats.

Thorburn said the saying began with a Bannuchi woman who gave her husband's ghee to a lover and blamed the cats. When the husband said he would weigh them, she answered with the proverb. His moral was to live and let live. [1]

که ډیري شي شادئ داسي به نه وي لکه پئي

Ka deri shi shadai dasi ba na wi lika pay.

Though pleasures become many, none will equal milk.

He called this a Marwat saying. [1]

Thorburn's notes on these sayings carry his own opinions of Bannuchis, Marwats and Wazirs, often unkind, and the proverbs themselves should not be read through them. A reader who wants more should take the Pashto and the literal English and set aside the commentary.

How the speech is judged

Lorimer's entry for the Waziri word lwar gives the example that the Waziri dialect is hard and that of the Bannuchis soft. [2] He does not say what makes it so, and the later descriptions show that the Waziri vowel shift is the one Bannuchi has too. The saying is better read as an impression than a measurement.

The most recent description is Khan's article in the Pashto Academy's journal, which treats Bannuchi (his Bani) as one of the Karlanri speeches beside Waziri, and sets it apart from Marwat. [6]

One piece of opinion is recorded about speakers on the edge. Thorburn wrote that the Niazi of Isakhel, across the Tang Darra pass, had given up Pashto for a broken Punjabi, and that Wazirs and Marwats called them "Hindkais" and mocked their pronunciation of tsa kre, "what are you doing?", as "Chi-Kri". [1] He reports what Wazirs and Marwats said of them, so the judgment is theirs as he heard it, not the Isakhel Niazis' own.